


What's Our Motto?

by FearNoEvil



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Case Fic, F/M, Featuring all sorts of silly Marvel Cameos, Friendship, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Organized Crime, Post-Episode: s01e08 The Defenders, Slice of Life, Teenagers, mentoring
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-04 01:36:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16337240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FearNoEvil/pseuds/FearNoEvil
Summary: In which Matt Murdock, running from his past, stumbles out of the convent in a haze, instinctively saves a girl from a fire, and somehow gets roped into becoming a guide to other vigilantes and mentor to a group of hotheaded justice-seeking teenagers with connections to organized crime.Effectively the Descendents/Sarah Jane Adventures of the Marvel Netflix world.





	What's Our Motto?

The world on fire was a haze now, a haze of pain and confusion, it was taking every mantra that Stick, his father, his Bible and Hymnal and Thurgood Marshall had ever taught him just for Matt to stay on his feet.  All his concentration, too – but that was partially by design.  If he kept walking, he didn’t have to think about where he’d come from – _who_ he’d come from.  The pain and purpose of walking would numb his memory away from it.

A few sounds and sensations made it through the haze: the impatient beep of a car horn, the beat of feathers as a pigeon changed course, the grit of the sidewalk, the glare of heat reflected from a nearby window, the caustic smell of smoke –

The smell of smoke?  Yes – not cigarette smoke, either: smoke from a large fire.  A burning building.  He coughed on it before he quite knew it, his senses a few steps ahead of his unfocused mind; he could feel it in his throat and his eyes now.  Honing in, he could feel the heat that emanated, he could hear the flames licking at wood, pieces falling.  From deep inside, he heard an canned, eerie wail of recorded opera music, and right beside it: a young woman’s panicky breath.

That dragged the rest of his haze-mired mind immediately to red alert.  She was there, listening through headphones to her canned opera music, trapped on the third floor as the flames rose around her, and she was unmoving, either paralyzed by fear, or simply having completely given up trying to escape with her life.  Maybe in listening to the music she had not heard the sounds of her danger until it was too late, and now she seemed to see no option but to let herself die.  With a deep sigh, for _just_ a split second, Matt stood in the street, allowing the pain in his legs and his chest and his shoulders and neck and eyes and everywhere to deafen him from the haze of smoke and the sound of the city’s suffering.  Then he stopped hesitating.

He ran toward the fire.

 

Running, however, was a relative term, because he was pretty sure one of his legs was at least somewhat broken.  It would definitely get all-the-way fully broken if he kept putting weight on it; each step was agony already.  Matt did not slow down.  The building was full of strange scents.  He didn’t have time to identify them; the stairs (fourteen) were losing stability by the minute and soon they wouldn’t be able to carry his weight up to the floor where the young woman was trapped.

Up five steps –

“Murdocks never quit!” he reminded himself in his head.

Up Two more –

He channeled Stick.  “Get up, Matty!  Get UP!”

Up Three more –

He thought of church.  “Fight the good fight with all thy might!  Chirst is thy strength and Christ thy right . . .”

He paused, gasping, falling forward, filling his lungs with acrid smoke which only tore at them worse.  Just five more steps and he’d be there. . .

Thurgood Marshall?

“We must dissent from the indifference, we must dissent from the apathy . . .”

Two more to the top.

“I can go the distance!”

Teen Hercules feebly sung in his head.  _Disney._   He was losing it.

One more step.

“Come on, Matty,” his father pleaded, his voice calm, understanding, but firm.  “Get to work.”

He’d reached the top.  A locked hot metal door stood between him and the girl.  Matt began to thrown himself at it, his already dislocated shoulder screaming in protest.  He ignored it and continued to make himself a human battering ram, listening for the wearing down of the little metal lock bar, if it could just slide and squeeze a bit . . .

“Is – someone there?”

The girl’s voice.  It was different than how he’d imagined from her breath.  She had some kind of accent – Russian, maybe.

“I’m here to rescue you,” Matt told her in a weak, gravelly voice.  He coughed.  “Don’t be afraid.”

“Oh sir,” the girl said.  “Don’t – j-just save yourself, sir.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Matt told her stubbornly at once.

The girl said nothing.  Her breath and heart showed that she was surprised.  She silently began to tug on her doorknob, trying to aid Matt in opening it.

With a last ferocious kick and sickening crunch that was probably as much his own tibia as the door frame, it flew open, hitting the girl and knocking her to the ground.

“Shit! Are you alright?” Matt gasped, crouching beside her. 

“Are you?” she asked feebly.

Matt didn’t answer, but tried to help her to her feet, only for his leg to give out halfway up.  With a moan he sunk back to his knees. 

The girl knelt beside him, her voice quiet and despairing.  “You should not have come.”

Matt ignored her.  “Let’s – get out of here – ” he panted, still on his knees, swiveling for the stairs.  But even as he said it, he heard some of the stairs crumbling.  Their infrastructure was burned away.  No way could they support two people’s rushed, desperate footsteps.

On her feet again, with in arm on Matt’s shoulder, the girl stared down at their path of escape going up in flames, and said again, “You should not have come.”  The last word was half a sob, and suddenly, her body sagged and she burst into tears.  “Oh G-god, you should not have come!  I - I did not want anyone hurt!  I’m s- sorry! I’m so sorry . . . Why did you come?”

Matt’s heart ached at the all-too-familiar guilt that coated her voice. He reached up to grip her hand.  “I came to save you,” he told her gently but firmly, “and I haven’t given up yet.”

“You will die because of me!” she sobbed.  Her body shuddered, inconsolable not that she was dying, but that Matt was dying beside her.

_Funny_ , he thought darkly, _the last girl I was in a collapsing building with didn’t seem half as bothered by that._

“N-not if you trust me,” Matt said after a pause to shake that from his mind.

“What, can you fly?” the girl guessed wetly, with a hysterical bitterness.  “You have – angel wings, hidden somewhere?”

“No,” he said with a laugh, swiveling with a grunt toward the window and honing in on the spaces and distances of the ground, the nearby objects and buildings, “but I have a _terrific_ command of physics.”

 

It took a few minutes more to convince the girl that jumping out the window was a good option.  He’d had to stress several points: that they were dying anyway, that he wouldn’t leave without her and her staying would ensure he would also die, that he knew exactly what he was doing, and how extremely horrible it would be to burn to death.

Though he’d calculated to minimize impact, and stumbled slightly, there was still a great deal of impact in his already damaged legs.  The girl’s added weight as she landed on top of him, though not much, was just enough to crush him down.

For a moment, he could do nothing but moan in agony, as the girl straightened up with an unending stream of bilingual apologies, getting her first good look at him outside of the shadows of flames and panic.

As she stared down at him suddenly she gasped.  “God in heaven,” she muttered.  “You’re – you’re Murdock. Y-you’re – blind?”

“How d’you know who I am?” Matt breathed, gritting his teeth with a sharp inhalation to keep in the pain.

“You put Wilson Fisk away,” she said earnestly.  “It is because of you that – I was able to sleep again, the first time . . . in so long.”

“Fisk was – giving you trouble?”

“Fisk _killed_ –”she began passionately, but then stopped.  “Yes,” she said instead, “he was – giving me trouble.  It is twice I owe you, Mr. Murdock.”

“Ah, don’t mention it,” Matt dismissed, trying to sit up with difficulty.  The girl seized hold of his hand and helped it the last two thirds, placing a bracing hand on his back.  “Do I – get to know your name?”

“I am Mickey,” she replied.

“You don’t exactly – sound like a Mickey,” he told her conversationally as she dragged him to his feet, supporting him as they stumbled out of the middle of the road, further away from the building smoldering behind them.

She managed a huff of laughter.  “From Mikhailovna,” she acknowledged, “My patronymic.  Mikhail was – my father. But Mickey – to the public, usually.  I don’t always sound this Russian – when I’m not dying.”

“Yes,” Matt said faintly, “I guess being close to death has a way of – bringing out our true selves.”

He had dragged himself along with her as the path of least resistance, but even that was becoming more impossible by the second.  If his senses were to be trusted, his right leg was broken in at least four places and his left was not doing all that much better.  His blood was all over the place, his old wounds from the _first_ burning building collapse screaming in protest.  He momentarily sank to his knees again and breathed shakily.

“I will – get you help, Mr. Murdock,” Mickey said uncertainly.  She sounded like she wanted to be certain, be reassuring, but there were too many factors weighing against it.  “A – a hospital.”

“Not a hospital,” Matt said quickly.

“Why? You’re very – you're very hurt, sir.”

“It – it’s complicated, Mickey.  But you said you’d trust me.  Not a hospital.”

“Alright,” she agreed hesitantly, “But if not a hospital – then what?  You have – someone to pick you up?”

“Maybe,” Matt muttered.  “Uh – you have a phone?”

Heat ignited under Mickey’s cheeks – a childish sort of embarrassment.  “My phone burned,” she confessed.  “And all my money.”  She shook her head in shame.  “I couldn’t even buy you a cab ride.”  She forced a hollow laugh.  “You don’t happen to have any very rich friends, do you?”

Matt tilted his head.  “Well, as a matter of fact . . .”

 

In twenty minutes’ time, Mickey had dragged Matt into a very tiny spit of green that apparently called itself a park, and leaned him against a its solitary tree.  She claimed it was a slightly safer place, but it was also filled with the excruciating, deafening grinding and chopping and clanging and beeping of nearby construction.

Mickey seemed to notice his discomfort.  “I – I will go fast,” she assured him.  “I will be back with help before you know.”

Matt nodded.  “Thank you, Mickey,” he grated out.

She watched him another second, and then swiftly removed her music player and headphones from where they had been resting around her shoulders.  “Here,” she said, thrusting it into his hands.  “Nicer sounds, and – something to think about, other than pain.  It’s mostly a lot of Blind Guardian, but –” her lips stuttered in embarrassment, but then she abruptly decided to own it, “s-so, it’s fitting – for you.”

Matt gave her a grin – genuine, but strained.  He suddenly didn’t want her to go, didn’t want to be alone with only his thoughts and his pain. 

Biting her lip, she abruptly she gripped him by the shoulder.  With her other hand, she picked up one of his, and guided it toward something dangling in front of her – the pendant on her necklace.  A cross.

“Y-you are not alone here,” she said, removing it and pressing it into his hand.  “You saved my life today – I will not forget.  I will not leave you, Mr. Murdock.  You have my word.”

And with that, she sprinted off into the lifting haze of the city, while Matt turned on the music, gripped the cross tightly, and leaned back with a sigh.

**Author's Note:**

> How was that? There are clear plans for a BIT of where this is going, vaguer plans for most of it. Mysteries about Matt's motives and Mickey are yet to be revealed. More familiar characters show up in the next chapter. I bet you can guess one. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed it!! Thanks so much for reading, and let me know what you thought!


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